Artifacts

"Artifacts" are the multimedia content of the ethnography-including
photographs, audio and video recordings, documents, maps, diagrams,
supplemental texts, and field notes-presented within a rich context of
explanation, metadata, relation to other artifacts, and, in some cases,
transcription and translation. Each artifact is a small piece of
information about some particular instance, dimension, or aspect of
village life; together these artifacts give insight into the
ethnography's sources, the evidence we have drawn on in creating our
interpretation of Xiakou's history.

Artifacts can open within the thematic essays, where we use them to
illustrate, support, supplement, and expand on the narrative. But
artifacts also "float free" of any fixed narrative association; that
is, they may appear in more than one essay, or they may reside solely
in the database, where they can be accessed through the tool pages:
search, people, places, gallery, documents, timeline, or through the
alphabetical index on this artifact page, below. When searching
the full database, the results are tabbed by category: features
(cultural features in the landscape), places (official place names),
people, texts, and media objects.

We use the term "artifact" to underscore the idea that the
information presented through the multimedia objects is not raw
objective fact, but rather is itself an act of interpretation or
artifice from which we build a larger story. By making these building
blocks accessible through the database, we aim both to make the
narrative more transparent, and to provide an alternative, more open
way to approach the body of material contained in the ethnography. In
other words, the reader can follow our narrative and open the artifacts
as illustrations within the essays, or she can go directly to the
artifacts, search through and arrange them by theme and time and type,
and freely explore the ethnography outside any fixed narrative
structure.